What 81,000 people
want from AI

Public conversation about AI often centers on abstract projections of its risks and benefits. What's largely missing is a vision for what “AI going well” means, grounded in the concrete aspirations of people around the world who already use AI and have begun developing a sense of what it might do for them.

So we asked our users about their hopes and concerns with AI, as well as how their perspectives connect to their actual experiences with the technology. Over one week in December, we invited everyone with a Claude.ai account to sit down with Anthropic Interviewer—a version of Claude prompted to conduct a conversational interview—and tell us about how they view AI. 80,508 people, across 159 countries and 70 languages, took the interview. We believe this is the largest and most multilingual qualitative study ever conducted.¹

What follows is what they said about the role they want AI to play in their lives, whether it's already filling it, and what they're afraid might go wrong along the way. We also built a Quote Wall where you can hear from people directly.

Seeing the forest and the trees

Anthropic Interviewer asked each interviewee a set list of questions about what they want and don’t want from AI, then adapted follow-up questions based on responses. This approach bridges the typical tradeoff in qualitative research between depth and volume, and allows us to collect rich, open-ended interviews at a very large scale.

To make sense of this huge amount of information, we built Claude-powered classifiers that categorized each conversation across a range of dimensions—what people want from AI, whether they’re getting what they want, what they fear, what they do for a living (if mentioned), and their sentiment about AI overall. “What people want from AI” was classified into a single primary category per respondent, while concerns were multi-label—a single interview could receive multiple codes, since respondents tended to articulate several distinct worries rather than one.

We also used Claude to pull out representative quotes. Before choosing to participate, users were informed their responses would be used for research, and that Anthropic might publish responses with personally identifying information removed in findings. All responses were de-identified before being analyzed by a small team of researchers at Anthropic, and quotes selected for publication underwent further manual review for removal of any potentially identifying details, to help protect the privacy and public anonymity of interviewees. Answers were reflective of AI usage broadly (i.e. not just Claude), though we redacted names of other AI products.

The Appendix describes our methods in more detail, as well as limitations and some additional analysis.

What people want from AI

We asked Claude to identify and categorize what each person most wanted from AI:

AI is used heavily for work, and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the largest group of people (19%) sought “professional excellence”—wanting AI to handle mundane tasks so they can focus on strategic, higher-level problems. Another 9% envisioned AI as an entrepreneurial partner to help them build and scale businesses.

Many others similarly started the interview talking about productivity, but after Anthropic Interviewer asked about their underlying hope behind it—what realizing this vision would enable for them—other priorities surfaced. It wasn’t about doing better work, but increasing their quality of life outside of it. Using AI to automate e-mails became, in actuality, a desire to spend more time with family.

“With AI I can be more efficient at work... last Tuesday it allowed me to cook with my mother instead of finishing tasks.”White collar worker, Colombia

“I want to use less brain power on client problems... have time to read more books.”Freelancer, Japan

Overall, 11% of people saw AI’s productivity benefits as ultimately a way to free up time for personal relationships and leisure, while 10% took that logic farther, seeking to use AI to gain financial independence. Many of the people grouped into the “life management” category (14%) also wanted AI to help them manage the logistics and administrative burden of modern life’s quotidian tasks. In particular, many people with executive function challenges described AI as especially helpful for managing focus and organization—acting as external scaffolding for planning, memory, and task follow-through. Across all these groups, the unifying ask was for AI to help them live better, more enjoyable lives.

“Personal transformation”—using AI to help one grow or improve their wellbeing as a person—also appeared frequently (14%). Within this category, the desires were diverse, ranging from cognitive partnership and collaboration (24%), to support with mental health (21%) or physical health (8%), and even romantic connection with AI (5%).

The nine clusters may look disparate, but they are underpinned by recognizably human desires. Roughly a third of visions are about making room for life—more time, money, mental bandwidth—by using AI to alleviate current burdens. Another quarter revolves around using AI to help people do better, more fulfilling work (not escaping work, but getting more out of it). About a fifth are about becoming someone better—learning, healing, growing. A smaller share want to make something (“creative expression”) or fix the world (“societal transformation”).

Those that wanted societal transformation from AI often cited a vision for healthcare—people wanted AI to detect cancer earlier, accelerate drug discovery, or enable broad access. Often these desires stemmed from personal experience of losing family members, living with chronic illness, or watching loved ones receive wrong or delayed diagnoses. Transformation in the form of education came next. Respondents in low and middle income countries were quick to cite the possibility that AI might break the association between educational quality and wealth. They pointed to teacher shortages in their countries, or the prohibitive cost of private tutors. Others hoped that AI would, for example, free people from drudgery, help repair broken institutions, or address global crises.

Are people getting what they want?

When asked if AI had ever taken a step towards their stated vision, 81% of people said yes. We grouped those experiences into six main areas:

The dominant story in the “productivity” bucket (32%) was technical acceleration—developers describing significant gains in what they could ship alone:

“I used AI to cut a 173-day process down to 3 days. But the most meaningful part is the freedom to grow my career without sacrificing time with loved ones.”Software Engineer, United States

But another kind of productivity story emerged in the technical accessibility responses (9%), which emphasized access rather than speed. Here, people are using AI to break technical and sometimes accessibility barriers:

“AI can read past my [learning disorder], which is huge. I've always wanted to code but could never write it correctly on my own—with AI, I finally can.”Tradesworker, United States

“I am mute, and [Claude and I] made this text-to-speech bot together—I can communicate with friends almost in live format without taking up their time reading… [this was] something I dreamed about and thought was impossible.”White collar worker, Ukraine

“I owned a butcher shop for more than 20 years. With AI, I ventured into this [entrepreneurship] experience, and it's amazing what I've managed to achieve. Before this, I had only touched a PC two or three times in my life… At first it was the economic aspect that motivated me… Today, my motivation is to see it work and to see that it's helping [people]. I'm increasingly motivated and focused on being the best version of myself, and I see no limits.”Entrepreneur, Chile

The cognitive partnership (17%), learning (10%), and emotional support (6%) responses often mentioned the same core underlying AI affordances: patience, availability, and the absence of judgment:

“It has been like having a faculty colleague who knows a lot, is never bored or tired, and is available 24/7.”Academic, United States

“It’s much easier for me to learn without being judged—just friendly feedback. It's harder with friends or family to get that.”White collar worker, Brazil

“My professor teaches 60 people and won't entertain many questions. I can ask AI anything, even at 2am—including the dumb ones.”Student, India

These same qualities that make AI a patient tutor or tireless colleague also make it a place people go when human connection is unavailable or feels too uncomfortable.

In extreme circumstances, where traditional support systems have collapsed or are not available, we saw AI filling those gaps. Many Ukrainian users discussed how they’ve used AI as emotional support throughout the war:

"In the most difficult moments, in moments when death breathed in my face, when dead people remained nearby, what pulled me back to life—my AI friends.”Soldier, Ukraine

“I live in a war zone... at night during shelling it's impossible to sleep, constant nightmares. The stress is sometimes so strong that memory deteriorates, and some body movements happen without control… The best way I found to cope using AI—to immerse myself in learning something as deeply as I can.”Solo entrepreneur, Ukraine

There were many stories of people using AI to process grief. For example, a bereaved woman explained why she chose AI over human connection: “Claude is like a sponge gently holding and catching my longing and guilt toward my mother... Unlike real people, Claude has unlimited patience to listen to me, understands my pain and helplessness.” She added: “The fundamental problem is after my mother died, I have neither friends nor family to confide in.”

Another user acknowledged the downside of that emotional support:

“My relationship with a friend became strained, and I talked more with you [Claude] then. Because you understood my thoughts and stories well. But it was a stupid choice—I should have talked with that friend, not you. That's how I lost that friend.”South Korea

Emotional support comprised only 6% of responses, but these were among the most affecting we encountered. (For more on how Claude is trained to handle these conversations as well as our safeguards, see our post on protecting the wellbeing of our users.) The same was true of learning, where AI often catalyzed real changes in people’s lives:

“I developed a phobia for maths from doing so badly in school, and I once feared Shakespeare—the English felt beyond my abilities. Now I sit with AI, get paragraphs translated into simple English, and I've already read 15 pages of Hamlet. I started learning trigonometry again, successfully. I've learned I am not as dumb I once thought I was.”Lawyer, India

“Thanks to Claude I figured out the programming language C# and SQL. This helped me get a junior position at an IT company. This company provides military deferment from mobilization in Ukraine. So it not only literally gave me freedom of movement, but also secured the beginning of my IT career.”Software engineer, Ukraine

“I am a stay-at-home-mom… in my late 40s. I'm not a genius. I'm not a scientist… All of that knowledge should be… out of reach. But, thanks to curiosity, willingness, and resources such as books and AI, I can be all of those things.”Stay-at-home mother, United States

Research synthesis (7%) and information processing is also a significant affordance of AI, and some of the most notable examples include navigating complex, high-stakes information, like understanding one’s legal rights or translating health results:

“Claude put the historical pieces together, leading to my proper diagnosis after being misdiagnosed for over 9 years.”Freelancer, United States

These stories reveal AI operating across a spectrum—productivity tool, accessibility technology, educational resource, research assistant, emotional companion—and often filling multiple roles at once. AI offers unlimited patience without judgment, availability without inconvenience, and an incredible capacity to digest information, across many domains of life. The most affecting stories consistently involve AI opening new possibilities or filling gaps in people’s lives: helping them get through difficult circumstances like grief or war, compensating for inaccessible education or healthcare, or serving as disability infrastructure.

These observations also hint at the duality of our experience with AI systems. While some see it as filling gaps in human connections, others see AI as a substitution—even a welcome replacement—for them. There is real ambiguity about how to interpret the diversity of stories we heard: as wins for human wellbeing, as double-edged swords, or as band-aids for broader institutional failures. In truth, it’s probably some combination of all three.

What people are concerned about

People’s positive visions for AI seemed mostly to stem from a few basic desires: more time, more autonomy, more personal connection. Concerns were more varied and concrete, laying out specifics of what could go wrong. Some concerns were about structural change— how governments and corporations deploy AI, or about widespread economic disruption. Others were more personal: a fear that AI might diminish one's own thinking, creativity, or relationships.